The demand for wireless broadband data has consistently increased. Unlicensed spectrum (i.e., frequency spectrum that does not require a license from an appropriate regulating entity) is being considered by wireless cellular network operators to increase the capacity of existing services that are offered over licensed spectrum.
The use of unlicensed spectrum in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system has been proposed as Licensed Assisted Access (LAA). Under LAA, the LTE standard is extended into unlicensed frequency deployments, thus enabling operators and vendors to maximally leverage the existing or planned investments in LTE hardware in the radio and core network.
One concern with LAA is the co-existence of the LTE radio nodes and other radio access technologies (RATs), such as WiFi and/or other LAA networks deployed by other operators using other unlicensed radio nodes. To enable the co-existence of the LTE radio nodes and other unlicensed nodes, listen-before-talk (LBT) (also called Clear Channel Assessment (CCA)) has been proposed. LBT is a contention protocol in which the LTE radio node determines whether a particular frequency channel is already occupied (e.g., by a WiFi node) before using the particular frequency channel. That is, with LBT, data packets may only be transmitted when a channel is sensed to be idle.